Inside NHPR

Two northern New England news organizations have received a national Edward R. Murrow Award for overall excellence from an organization representing local and network journalists in broadcasting, cable and digital media in more than 30 countries.

The awards for New Hampshire Public Radio in Concord and Free Press Media in Burlington, Vermont, were announced Wednesday by the Radio Television Digital News Association.

Meet Peter Biello, the new voice of NHPR's "All Things Considered." Peter comes to NHPR from Vermont Public Radio, where he worked as a producer and announcer. Before working at VPR, Peter was Morning Edition host at WHQR in Wilmington, N.C.

If you're worried about missing Brady Carlson, don't fret! Brady has taken on a new role at NHPR; he'll be reporting on business and the economy for NHPR News and will host Weekend Edition on NHPR.

Do you like the music you hear between segments on Word of Mouth? You can listen to it again on Spotify. Check out and add Word of Mouth's playlist, which we update each week with the latest music we're using on the program.

NHPR's held the third annual Trivia Smackdown 2015 is on April 3 at the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord. 28 competed this year answering four rounds of trivia questions, hosted by the one and only Trivia Guru, Phil Kliger.

And this year's winners? None other than our defending champions two years running...The Defenders!

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who submitted answers to our questionnaire. We'll leave it up in case some of you haven't had a chance to submit. Here's a link to the answers we've received so far:Questionnaire Results.

The Rising Stars Awards are an initiative of Stay Work Play, in partnership with New Hampshire Public Radio, to celebrate and recognize New Hampshire’s remarkable young professionals and college students, initiatives to keep them here, and the businesses and programs that go the extra mile to recruit and retain them.

NHPR President and CEO Betsy Gardella joins us to share the latest news about NHPR programming, funding and strategy. Betsy is also on the board of NPR, and talks about the challenges facing public radio, digital disruption, and why NPR's new CEO has her excited about the future of radio.

Guest

Betsy Gardella​ - President and CEO of NHPR. She serves on the National Public Radio Board of Directors, where she assists in setting the policies and overall priorities of NPR management.

George Herman “Babe” Ruth made his major league debut this week 100 years ago (7/11/1914) with the Boston Red Sox. He had just 10 at-bats in 5 games that season, pitching four, and earning $2,500

10 years ago The Front Porch (NHPR’s nightly arts program until 2007) went to Conway, NH to speak with Julia Ruth Stevens, the Babe’s adopted daughter. Stevens spoke to NHPR’s John Walters about living with the most famous man in America, “we never thought about it when we were all at home. He was Daddy and we were just like any other family.”

“Our country is a nation on the make,” according to historian Walter McDougall. He says we’re builders, dreamers, go-getters, inventers and organizers, so much so that "hustling" has become an indelible part of the American character and American history. He means it in all senses of the word, even going back as far as colonists's first arrival on American soil.

On June 10, a listener in Danville, IL picked up 90 seconds of NHPR signal. A station’s radio wave “footprint”, or estimated range, is generally considered to extend only about as far as the eye can see from the point of the antenna, but Danville is just under a thousand miles away. It would take more than a good pair of binoculars to put Danville within range of sight; so how did this happen?

Amateur radio enthusiasts, known as “DXers”, describe what our listener caught a glimpse of as an “E-Skip”.

This unassuming hard drive contains more than 500 GB of audio, the digital representation of 280 tape reels. A couple months ago, I mentioned that NHPR was sending the last of the tape reels in our archive to Crawford Media to be digitized. And today the fruits of their labor appeared in the form of this orange-y goodness. (They also sent along a few pictures of the digitization process, take a look at the slideshow above).

Six years after launching Word of Mouth, we still feel like upstarts and appreciate our listeners coming through. Thank you! It's pleasure to bring you stories that spark curiosity and wonder about the world around us, and will continue spreading interesting information the best way we know how: through Word of Mouth.

And not only was Word of Mouth voted Best New Hampshire Radio Talk Show, but NHPR was voted Best FM Radio Station!

With all that in mind, here is a look back at some of your favorite Word of Mouth stories from the past year.

NHPR is pleased to announce that as of approximately 3 P.M. on June 11, we began broadcasting from our new translator in Holderness, New Hampshire. Residents in the towns of Holderness, Ashland, Center Harbor, Sandwich, and Meredith can now tune in to NHPR at 96.5 on their FM dials.

The new signal was officially launched on Tuesday, June 24th, at an event attended by NHPR donors and residents of the region. You can see an album of photos from the event right here.

As an intern at NHPR, I get the chance to see how radio stories are made up close. Here’s what happened when NHPR’s Environment reporter invited me for a ride-along to help him do a little reporting about an event called BioBLITZ. - Austin

As always, the day begins early for Environment reporter Sam Evans-Brown. We make the drive up to North Conway in time for the 9 am start of the BioBLITZ.

For Sean Hurley's Foodstuffs story on New Hampshire's Ice Cream trail, we asked our listeners and Facebook fans to submit their favorite ice cream stands in New Hampshire. Here's the map that resulted, and it's not too late to add to it! Email us your picks, and we'll put them in the map.

If you have World Cup fever, you’ll know Brazil and Croatia kick off the tournament Thursday. Even if you don’t have the fever; even if the brouhaha over Landon Donovan last month didn’t register; even if you have only the faintest understanding of who David Beckham is; you know that the U.S. has never been a favorite in the sport of international soccer.

On a Monday morning the weather more closely resembled Martin Luther King Jr’s hometown of Atlanta, than it did downtown Concord. But the heat and humidity didn’t discourage those who had gathered at the statehouse for the historic bill signing.

Memorial Day is probably the most archives-centric holiday in the year. While many holidays are a flush of personal memories and family traditions, Memorial Day is more about our collective memory as fellow countrymen. And archives are a conduit to our collective memory.

I was listening back this week to New Hampshire Daily, a half hour NH news program we aired from October, 1989 to February, 1992. I was listening to the programs from the week of 14 May, 1990. Among the news of the day (including the death of Jim Hensen, and Lithuania’s independence negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev) was a four part series we produced about the Canterbury Shaker Village.